We've been asked this more than once, so I thought it was about time I answered it.

The short answer is no: SMF mods and themes will not work properly on Wedge without significant overhaul, and this is completely intentional.

It's not about being petty and intentionally breaking it just to annoy people, there are major factors that we sat down - both of us being experienced mod writers - and decided we wanted to tackle.

SMF mods explicitly rely on the code, a mod package is really just a set of find/replace instructions on the code. The only way to retain a reasonable level of compatibility with SMF mods is to not change the code. It isn't ideal, of course, but it is the only way to go about that in the SMF world.

This causes multiple problems, file permissions giving everyone grief, as well as more and more mods being installed causes them to collide further and further until the point where mods just refuse to install because the code they look for has already been installed.

Add to that, that mods on custom themes are at best variable in terms of success and you find yourself in a world of hassle after a while, even when you're using mods written by people who know the code well enough to avoid most of the trouble.

The consequence is a serious amount of rearchitecting the core of SMF in Wedge, to make it far less dependent on mods having to edit the code itself. The downside is that in the short term, users may find a restricted choice of features available to them, while modders learn how to leverage the power of modding in Wedge without code editing.

As for themes, the amount of change is smaller, but still we've made a large number of changes to the default theme, meaning that any theme will need reworking for Wedge as well, but the compatibility should be greater in the long term.

tl:dr; No, themes and mods won't work. But for the hassle of modders and themers learning how to work on Wedge, everyone wins because you'll be able to drop things in with less hassle (if they're written properly), and both the modders and themers should find there is a lower support requirement because the base is that much more flexible.Also, we will document the main changes we made, so that modders can easily adapt to them.

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